Category: Social Media

Social media marketing (SMM) is a relatively new form of advertising, one which can greatly improve the success of your business if used right. However, if you don’t get it right, social media marketing can end up costing you a whole lot of money for very few results.

One of the most important aspects of social media marketing is targeting the right audience. Most social media platforms allow you to set very specific adds which are delivered to a very specific audience. Doing this is very important for a number of reasons, including:

It will help you get more website views:

Once you have identified your target audience, good quality SMM ads can help drive them to your social media page or website. Targeting the right people will increase your conversion rate, and will prevent you wasting your time delivering ads to people who will simply scroll past them. After all, the whole point of marketing is to increase the amount of people engaging with you.

Oh, you think you’re pretty savvy and sophisticated, with your Twitter and Facebook and Blogger? You think we’ve gone places and done things that could never have been done before? That we’re living in the future, plugged into a worldwide hivemind that our predecessors could only dream of?

Nah, actually, Wired assures us that we’re not any different than prehistoric cavemen when it comes to social networks. Researchers studied a primitive tribe of hunter-gatherers and discovered that they had the same behavior patterns in socializing that our electronic socializing does. They found matches in mutual popularity, closer friends versus more remote ones, and similarity breeding friendship, among other factors. Continue reading

Since other bloggers are jumping on the band wagon and making predictions for 2009 (because that’s what bloggers do!), I’ll go one better, and also delay the time before anybody can prove me wrong: I’ll predict through 2014! OK, crystal ball/ on the table/ tell all the future/ that you’re able. Something’s coming in…

Yahoo still won’t get bought. – Did that get your attention? We spent the better part of 2008 gossiping about Yahoo and Microsoft and their expected tryst. Never happened. Microsoft is too greedy to pay through the nose and Yahoo is too full of pride to offer lower. And Yahoo is actually still more profitable than some 90% of web-based businesses. They still made $7.22 billion in 2008 and they’re still a Fortune 500 company, OK?

Google will launch their own stand-alone operating system. – They kind of have that already – Android on the phone, Chrome for a web browser, Gears for widgets, Google Docs for office tools, SketchUp for a graphics editor. Put all the pieces together and make a boot-loader, that’s all they have to do. Microsoft is literally shaking in its shoes at this one.

More astroturf. – “Astroturf” is where a professional hired by a corporation poses as your friend in a social site, then tries to sell you something. Worse, ten of them band together to mod you down if you have anything bad to say about their product, and up if you cheer for their product. They’ll also troll and badger you to change your opinion. It’s fake grassroots support, so they call it “astroturfing”. Expect tons more. We already saw it online this year with the United States presidential election and candidate Ron Paul’s fake support, the fake hype over movies such as “The Dark Knight” and “Iron Man”, and the usual dirty tricks by big corporations everywhere. Expect to see jobs hiring professional commenters.

Sun Microsystems is going down. – Open-sourcing Solaris and Java was their last gasp. Even that hasn’t helped either of these limping technologies pick up new supporters. Without Solaris and Java, Sun has some nice servers to sell, and that’s it.